I already knew that Morton Ann Gernsbacher was a genius ( see her excellent, open stats classes that use spreadsheets ). So you can imagine how pleased I was to meet her at APS2022. While her talk and message were great, I am here to share one of her presentation resources: Photofunia. This website creates images that contain your text and words, and I'm pretty amused. I think this could be a low-key way to draw attention to commonly made mistakes and big take-home messages. They work in a Powerpoint but are more attention-grabbing than just using a larger font size or bolding your text.

Maybe this is the sort of thing you will like. I guarantee you, it is spook-tacular.   https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Gu4VYsYTNJ28RtBf6cNp1xszjo-bfItSHAp-C0PiEbY/edit?usp=sharing

Go follow Statsystem ( Facebook , Instagram ). They are a smarty pants who dreams and thinks in stats memes. I know these are silly and hilarious and fun. I think these are good for a nerd chuckle for ourselves. And who doesn't need more nerd chuckles? I also think these are light, funny, accessible ways to back up a more complex stats lesson with a succinct meme that conveys the guts of a lesson.  See: Power Regression: Central Limit Theorem: T-tests: And don't forget the big picture:

Have you ever looked through stock images for data and statistics? They are fine. They aren't great, they aren't awful, they are just fine. Like, they either look like something from The Matrix: Or like statisticians are magicians: Some images are a combination of the first two, with a statistician-magician freeing himself from The Matrix: Again, they aren't terrible but they aren't beautiful.  Lucky for you, I'm a magpie collecting interesting statistical things, including interesting statistics/data images accompanying news stories. Many talented artists have created beautiful, abstract stats images to accompany their articles. They look very nice as a background on a PowerPoint, an opening page on Blackboard, or an image on a syllabus. Here are some of my favorites. I've included citations or where I found the images where I can and plan to reverse Google search the rest someday. Needless to say, I created none of this.  https://twitter.com/RetractionWatch/st...

You guys, there is a new subreddit just for sharing silly stats memes. It is called r/data_irl/ . The origin story is pretty amusing. I have blogged about the subreddit r/dataisbeautiful  previously. The point of this sub is to share useful and interesting data visualizations. The sub has a hard and fast rule about only posting original content or well-cited, serious content. It is a great sub. But it leaves something to be desired. That something is my deep desire to see stats jokes and memes. On April Fool's Day this year, they got rid of their strict posting rules for a day and the dataisbeautiful crowd provided lots of hilarious stats jokes, like these two I posted on Twitter: The response was so strong, because there are so many of people that love stats memes, that a new sub was started, data_irl JUST TO SHARE SILL STATS GRAPHICS. It feels like coming home to my people. 

Gleaned from multiple sources (FB, Pinterest, Twitter, none of these belong to me, etc.). Remember, if your students can explain why a stats funny is funny, they are demonstrating statistical knowledge. I like to ask students to explain the humor in such examples for extra credit points (see below for an example from my FA14 final exam). Using xkcd.com for bonus points/assessing if students understand that correlation =/= causation What are the numerical thresholds for probability?  How does this refer to alpha? What type of error is being described, Type I or Type II? What measure of central tendency is being described? Dilbert: http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Kill%20Anyone Sampling, CLT http://foulmouthedbaker.com/2013/10/03/graphs-belong-on-cakes/ Because control vs. sample, standard deviations, normal curves. Also,"skewed" pun. If you go to the original website , the story behind this cakes has to do w...